When you think of Peugeots in North America, the Peugeot 403 probably isn't the car that comes to mind. That's understandable. Quite a few current Peugeot 505 owners we asked were unable to correctly name Peugeot's first offering in America. But the 403 is where it all began for Peugeot in the United States, and recently we got a chance to ride in a 1966 Peugeot 403B saloon owned by Jim Schlick of Bloomington, Ind. Schlick's collection numbers 10 automobiles from this French marque, in addition to two Peugeot daily drivers.

The Pininfarina-styled 403 arrived on the automotive scene in 1955, offering a spacious and modern range of sedans, station wagons, convertibles and even pickups. This was Peugeot's first collaboration with the Italian design house, and the 403 ended up influencing the look of Peugeot cars for some years. The 403 entered production in 1955, employing an enlarged version of the straight-four engine out of the Peugeot 203. The 1,468-cc engine produced 65 hp, which was respectable for the time and represented a modest improvement over the 203.

Despite what one might expect, the 403 was not a true chronological successor to the 203, as the two models were sold alongside each other for eight years. Still, the 403 borrowed a lion's share -- pun intended -- of its mechanicals from the much older 203 range. And the 403 was the first Peugeot officially sold in America in the postwar years.

The 403's front fascia Photo by Jay Ramey

Despite this particular Peugeot's current state of residence, this was originally an East Coast car sold by a Peugeot dealer based in Old Saybrook, Conn.

“My late wife and I bought it from a guy who had sold it to a little old lady,” Schlick says. “He was a Peugeot dealer, and a few years later he bought it from her estate, and then stored it for a while. Dave Hackett was his name.”

The 403 was Peugeot's most luxurious offering when it premiered, a fact that perhaps becomes diluted with time given the car's relatively snug interior. But the mid-1950s were essentially a time when France was beginning to right itself from the economic woes of the immediate postwar years. The 403 was the first large sedan offered after the 202 and 203 ranges, which effectively used technology frozen since the late 1930s.

The snug interior of the 403 saloon Photo by Jay Ramey

As we settle into the 403 for a ride, it is immediately apparent that the car is from the 1960s. The door shuts with a solid clunk that we heard last in a 1960s Mercedes-Benz saloon, and the interior greets us with chrome accents and nice soft seats. The seating position does not invite lounging and instead is more upright than in modern cars, but it works remarkably well ergonomically.

How did Schlick acquire an impressive Peugeot collection in a part of the country not known for its number of French automobiles?

“Pam and I grew up in Iowa, and her grandfather gave her brother a 1960 403 when Pam was 16 and her brother was 15. So he couldn't drive, she could, so she drove it,” Schlick says. “A few years later we met and got married, and living in Bloomington, Ind., and driving down this back road there was 403 sitting by the barn. And she said that looks like the car that pappy had given her.

“I worked for the Navy at the time and knew of the guy who had the property, so I called him up and he basically said, 'This is my brother's car. My nephew's been working on it and he's kind of given up. … If you want it just haul it away.'

“And that was Peugeot No. 1. So that would have been 1971. And so that's what got us going. And we ended up trading a '71 Chevelle for a '71 504 that had the four-speed on the column.”

“Do you still have that one?” we ask.

“No, that one got into a bit of a fender bender," he said. "And we bought a used 504, traded that in on a '76 504 diesel, and ran that for a 150,000 miles. In the meantime we bought two or three different 404s, so the last non-Peugeots that I've owned were a '71 Chevelle and a '74 Pinto, not counting a '94 Harley.”

The roomy engine bay Photo by Jay Ramey

It is difficult to talk about the Peugeot 403 without mentioning the competition from just across the country. Citroen in 1955 brought out the DS, a car that dominated the large French sedan segment for decades and became an icon of the French automotive industry. It's almost futile to try to compare the two. Despite the 403 and DS nominally existing in the same class, about the only common features are that both have four wheels and an engine with the same number of cylinders.

As we drive down the street, the 403 feels well composed with relatively minimal body roll, and the column-mounted transmission appears to shift quite smoothly. The steering column shifter setup in the 403 is unobtrusive to the point that we almost forget that this car has a manual transmission. The transmission in the 403 is a three-speed, with the fourth gear being overdrive. Still, the car's 68 bhp engine appears to be working fairly hard to keep us moving with modern traffic. French automobiles of the 1950s were built for fuel economy, not performance, as cars and gasoline were scarce in postwar France.

Schlick has put only 10,000 miles on the 403 since buying it in 1997, with the odometer showing just 61,595 miles, and the car is almost entirely original except for a respray some years ago. The chrome has held up very well, as has the interior, which is still very much original. The size of Schlick's fleet has a lot to do with the wonderful conditions that his cars are in, as any given example does only a few hundred miles a year, mostly traveling to and from classic events on the East Coast. While some may wonder how easy it is to find parts for a dozen classic French cars in the Midwest, the Internet has become the answer for owners of rare foreign machinery in the United States. Peugeot kept an office in New Jersey until a few years ago to help owners of stateside Peugeots source parts, but that location has since closed.

The trunklid of the 403 Photo by Jay Ramey

As Schlick opens the hood of the 403, the layout of the engine compartment surprises with how much space the little engine itself occupies. “So you haven't had to do much work at all just aside from regular maintenance on this one?” we ask.

“Nope” Schlick says.

“Is it pretty hard to get parts?” we ask.

Schlick shakes his head. “There's a Peugeot specialist in the U.K. that I've gotten quite a few parts from, and there's a guy in Germany who I've gotten parts from, too.”

“What kind of comments do you get about this car around town when you drive it back home in Indiana?” we ask.

“I get a lot of 'Oh, my grandfather had one of those!' Or like here especially, a lot of people remember these cars. One guy from New Zealand stopped by and said he grew up in the back seat of one of these. Around Bloomington, after they mispronounce it, they wonder who makes it,” Schlick says.

“You ever tell them it's a Nash?” we ask, and Schlick starts laughing.

Still, the sight of a Peugeot in rural Indiana is not as unusual as some might think, as there were a couple of Peugeot dealers in Indianapolis until the early 1990s. But most Peugeots sold at dealerships in the Midwest, which often tended to be hundreds of miles apart, are no longer on the road.

And yes, even an optional sunroof Photo by Jay Ramey

“There's a guy who owns a French restaurant who has a 505 wagon and a 405DL, and I think another 505,” Schlick says.

“In Bloomington?”

“Yeah, they're held together by baling wire and duct tape,” Schlick says.

One could say that the exterior design of the 403 was merely tweaked for the 404 range, which premiered in 1960. The production runs of the 203, 403 and 404 all overlapped quite a bit, despite the three cars largely offering more or less identical interior packaging. To us it might seem unusual for a major automaker to offer two similar sedans in the same segment, but it's easy to forget that during much of the 1950s Peugeot offered only two automobiles at any one time.

There aren't many 403s left on America's roads despite the fact that more than 1.2 million were made during its production run. Schlick estimates that there are only a couple dozen examples of this model in the United States, and they're mostly in collections on the West Coast. There is no getting around the fact that the 403 is rare even in Peugeot circles, and it has been quite a few years since I have seen one. And that made taking a ride in Schlick's 403 that much more special.